On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 01:08:31PM +0100, Chris Dornan wrote: > For those who haven’t seen it Uday Reddy has a comprehensive answer to a > request to explain referential transparency on Stack Overflow. > > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/210835/what-is-referential-transparency/9 > 859966#9859966 > > For good measure he finishes with a rather scathing assessment of functional > programmers’ claim to ownership of RT: > > Functional programmers don't know much of this research. > Their ideas on referential transparency are to be taken > with a large grain of salt. > > Marvellous! 'Tis rare to find such a robust assessment combined with > understanding (and it certainly makes me think a bit).
So a language is referentially transparent if replacing a sub-term with another with the same denotation doesn't change the overall meaning? But then isn't any language RT with a sufficiently cunning denotational semantics? Or even a dumb one that gives each term a distinct denotation. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
